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> Going luddite Please, I do wish you would think carefully before using what is really a pejorative and potentially quite insulting term in regard to modern t

> Going luddite Please, I do wish you would think carefully before using what is really a pejorative and potentially quite insulting term in regard to modern tech critique. Some of the smartest people out there, who built the digital world you take for granted today, are having (belated) second thoughts about the social and geo-political impacts of these creations. Heartily I recommend Cory Doctorow's recent piece about this [1]. One could arguably turn it around and say that those "cargo-cultists" hell-bent on ploughing ahead regardless, without pause or reflection, are closer to the common misuse of the word "Luddite" - a kind of straw-chewing bumpkin who lives in fear of progress. No. Progress is the radical questioning of "progress" itself. > We'll just have to accept the consequences of what all this new > development has brought us and learn how to live with it No we won't. Be careful of this "genie and bottle" fallacy. It is absolutely the wrong attitude found at the intersection of unreasoned defeatism, resignation, learned helplessness, and abdication of civic engagement and responsibility. We are here, as hackers, to _shape_ the technology that runs our world, not to sit on the sidelines and amuse ourselves to death [2]. > recreating an environment that only really worked for a small subsection of humanity. There's a framing error in this reasoning. The technology of Web 1.0 did not exist in limited scope because it was only suitable for a small subsection of humanity. It was only being used by a small subsection because that was the developmental stage of the web. One could say (disingenuously) that at the time Web 1.0 was such a successful technology it was being used by 100 percent of web users! [1] https://onezero.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature-56ed9cfc5470 https://onezero.medium.com/science-fiction-is-a-luddite-lite... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death

Clubber 5y ago
Just to add, Luddites weren't irrationally afraid of technology like is commonly believed. They destroyed machinery because they saw it being used to destroy artisanship and their livelihoods. Perhaps we'd be better off of there were more Luddites going from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 or offshoring jobs, or military AI. Just as an example, I own furniture my parents bought in the 1960s when they were first married. It's still solid. My family has furniture from the 1800s that still is solid. The furniture I buy today I have to replace every 5 years and is complete garbage. Maybe we should stop considering being a Luddite as a pejorative and perhaps concede they might have been right about some industries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  > My family has furniture from the 1800s that still is solid. The furniture I buy today I have to replace every 5 years and is complete garbage. This is the perfect example of where this ideology fails. You can _still_ find furniture like those bought in the 1800s that stand the test of time. Cabinetmakers exist and would be happy to build nice furniture that will outlive both the cabinetmaker and yourself. In the age of the Web many of them advertise their services online. The reason most people don't buy furniture from a cabinetmaker is because their furniture is _expensive_. Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite expensive as well. Families would save up to buy furniture and preserve it at all cost because of how expensive it was to get nice furniture. Wealthy families would have nice furniture passed down for generations while poorer families made do with their seconds and thirds. Moreover cabinetmakers in the past often relied on cheap stocks of solid wood. In the present, wood has become more scarce due to overforesting and environmental concerns. When you buy furniture made from MDF it uses an order of magnitude less wood than a solid piece of Oak or Poplar made in the 1800s or even plywood from the 1960s. This comes at the cost of worse load-bearing capabilities and brittle joints. The difference is that consumers now have the option for cheap, environmentally friendly furniture. If a consumer wants long lasting furniture, they could do what most cultures did in the past; save up for furniture over years and commission a cabinetmaker for their services. If you want furniture that lasts made of mostly solid wood and/or plywood, cabinetmakers would be overjoyed to work with you. Most consumers don't care enough about furniture to inflate the cost 10x for long lasting furniture. That's their choice as consumers.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > Moreover cabinetmakers in the past often relied on cheap stocks of solid wood. A luthier I met in Berlin had a large stock of wood in their workshop. I asked him what it was for, and he said "oh, that's my supply for the next 10 years, I add to it every year to keep it about the same size". Granted, luthiers use less wood than a cabinet maker.
  - jjav 5y ago
    > You can _still_ find furniture like those bought in the 1800s that stand the test of time. You mostly can't. I always wanted quality wood furniture and once I had enough income I went shopping. Nothing. It can't be bought anywhere that I can find. Eventually gave up and bought the nicest office furniture I could find but it is still a very nice veneer over junk plywood. And even that was many thousands of dollars because it is a nice veneer instead of a cheap junk veneer. > Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite expensive as well. Not really. Both my grandparent families were dirt poor small farmers and the furniture they had was orders of magnitude better quality than anything I can find or buy on a 2020s silicon valley tech salary.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> There's a framing error in this reasoning. The technology of Web 1.0 did not exist in limited scope because it was only suitable for a small subsection of humanity. It was only being used by a small subsection because that was the developmental stage of the web. One could say (disingenuously) that at the time Web 1.0 was such a successful technology it was being used by 100 percent of web users! Do you have any proof of those assertions? You're strident in defending your ideology but this claim seems fantastically unsubstantiated. I remember trying to help parents and non technical friends use Web 1.0. they'd get URLs wrong, forget which TLDs a site hung off, clicked on phishing emails, and deal with hundreds of pop-up ads. Web 2.0, as much as this wasn't a buzzword, was a strict increase in usability for every non-technical person I know.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  > Do you have any proof of those assertions? You're strident in defending your ideology It's a logical argument with one premise - that fewer people used the internet in the past than today - which I hope you can accept without further proof.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > and deal with hundreds of pop-up ads. Web 2.0 was a strict increase in usability for every non-technical person I know. I have no idea precisely what you are calling "Web 2.0" because in my mind, the technology elements of Web 2.0 outlined on the wikipedia page definitely have absolutely nothing to do with "getting URLs wrong", "forgetting TLDs". Changes from the same time period (around 1999) that were not typically considered to be part of "Web 2.0" were also responsible for a dramatic increase in the prevalence of popup ads. I think you're talking about something entirely different.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    It's tricky because I don't know what Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc even mean since they're poorly defined. Generally I see the anti-Web2.0 digital vegan perspectives to be about opposing Javascript. I maintain that the Web after widespread Javascript was strictly more usable for non-technical people. I disagree that the pre-JS web was somehow incomplete or in a developer preview.
DrSiemer 5y ago
Of course we should not be complacent about it. We can try to come up with creative solutions, that limit the more negative side effects of this thing we have unleashed. But the one thing we cannot do is take it back. The general public needs their nuggets of endorfine. There is a lot of rosy retrospection when it comes to the old web, but really, most blogs were a pretty lonely place back then. It is hard to deny how modern solutions allow even someone with the most limited technical skillset to establish a meaningful online presence. Web 1.0 simply did not provide the same level of accessibility.
- nonrandomstring 5y ago
  > But the one thing we cannot do is take it back. True. We cannot take it back in it's entirety, nor would we want to. But for some people that quickly becomes the argument for a kind of technological irreversibility principle, that we cannot take back any mis-step or feature no matter how immediately awful and obvious its effects. Left unchallenged that entitlement becomes an argument for bullheaded intransigence and the labelling of whatever suits us as 'progress'. In reality many "genies" are strategically limited; poisons, invasive species, bio-agents, nuclear materials, knowledge hazards, weapons, bad poetry... Sure, I am really glad we won the crypto wars and that "code wants to be free" etcetera, but on the other hand that seems to have set off a kind of megalomania in tech, which legitimises turning the entire digital world into our own personal laboratory for experimenting on everyone, sans ethics oversight committee. > The general public needs their nuggets of endorfine. Here we go again "saying what people need" for them. I meet a lot of people desperate to get off the digital morphine drip. > There is a lot of rosy retrospection when it comes to the old web It seems like that. I've made a more elaborate argument in other threads. You're right that it's "rosy", like all nostalgia. Of course the past was crap in its own ways. But melancholia is a symptom of crisis, retro is a sign of interregnum and loss of common sense (literally our common sense of things). What does it mean? It means that our "progress" isn't serving us fully, and in some cases causing people to recoil from it. Not acknowledging that would be an error. > Web 1.0 simply did not provide the same level of accessibility. Of course not. But there are many qualities/metrics by which we might judge things if we are to avoid what I'd call the "democratic fallacy"; external cost, stability, longevity, coherence, security, safety, interoperability, accuracy and truth content, environmental cost.... Technology is multi-dimensional. Accessibility is all lovely and cool, but it should not be put ahead of more important human concerns. OTC opioids are more accessible than street drugs ever were, that doesn't make it an unqualified "good thing". So we can still enumerate the ways in which Web 2.0 is worse than Web 1.0 without invoking nostalgia for a "smaller cosy digital world".

Clubber 5y ago

Just to add, Luddites weren't irrationally afraid of technology like is commonly believed. They destroyed machinery because they saw it being used to destroy artisanship and their livelihoods. Perhaps we'd be better off of there were more Luddites going from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 or offshoring jobs, or military AI. Just as an example, I own furniture my parents bought in the 1960s when they were first married. It's still solid. My family has furniture from the 1800s that still is solid. The furniture I buy today I have to replace every 5 years and is complete garbage. Maybe we should stop considering being a Luddite as a pejorative and perhaps concede they might have been right about some industries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

Karrot_Kream 5y ago
> My family has furniture from the 1800s that still is solid. The furniture I buy today I have to replace every 5 years and is complete garbage. This is the perfect example of where this ideology fails. You can _still_ find furniture like those bought in the 1800s that stand the test of time. Cabinetmakers exist and would be happy to build nice furniture that will outlive both the cabinetmaker and yourself. In the age of the Web many of them advertise their services online. The reason most people don't buy furniture from a cabinetmaker is because their furniture is _expensive_. Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite expensive as well. Families would save up to buy furniture and preserve it at all cost because of how expensive it was to get nice furniture. Wealthy families would have nice furniture passed down for generations while poorer families made do with their seconds and thirds. Moreover cabinetmakers in the past often relied on cheap stocks of solid wood. In the present, wood has become more scarce due to overforesting and environmental concerns. When you buy furniture made from MDF it uses an order of magnitude less wood than a solid piece of Oak or Poplar made in the 1800s or even plywood from the 1960s. This comes at the cost of worse load-bearing capabilities and brittle joints. The difference is that consumers now have the option for cheap, environmentally friendly furniture. If a consumer wants long lasting furniture, they could do what most cultures did in the past; save up for furniture over years and commission a cabinetmaker for their services. If you want furniture that lasts made of mostly solid wood and/or plywood, cabinetmakers would be overjoyed to work with you. Most consumers don't care enough about furniture to inflate the cost 10x for long lasting furniture. That's their choice as consumers.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > Moreover cabinetmakers in the past often relied on cheap stocks of solid wood. A luthier I met in Berlin had a large stock of wood in their workshop. I asked him what it was for, and he said "oh, that's my supply for the next 10 years, I add to it every year to keep it about the same size". Granted, luthiers use less wood than a cabinet maker.
- jjav 5y ago
  > You can _still_ find furniture like those bought in the 1800s that stand the test of time. You mostly can't. I always wanted quality wood furniture and once I had enough income I went shopping. Nothing. It can't be bought anywhere that I can find. Eventually gave up and bought the nicest office furniture I could find but it is still a very nice veneer over junk plywood. And even that was many thousands of dollars because it is a nice veneer instead of a cheap junk veneer. > Make no mistake, furniture in the past was quite expensive as well. Not really. Both my grandparent families were dirt poor small farmers and the furniture they had was orders of magnitude better quality than anything I can find or buy on a 2020s silicon valley tech salary.

Karrot_Kream 5y ago

> There's a framing error in this reasoning. The technology of Web 1.0 did not exist in limited scope because it was only suitable for a small subsection of humanity. It was only being used by a small subsection because that was the developmental stage of the web. One could say (disingenuously) that at the time Web 1.0 was such a successful technology it was being used by 100 percent of web users! Do you have any proof of those assertions? You're strident in defending your ideology but this claim seems fantastically unsubstantiated. I remember trying to help parents and non technical friends use Web 1.0. they'd get URLs wrong, forget which TLDs a site hung off, clicked on phishing emails, and deal with hundreds of pop-up ads. Web 2.0, as much as this wasn't a buzzword, was a strict increase in usability for every non-technical person I know.

nonrandomstring 5y ago
> Do you have any proof of those assertions? You're strident in defending your ideology It's a logical argument with one premise - that fewer people used the internet in the past than today - which I hope you can accept without further proof.
PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> and deal with hundreds of pop-up ads. Web 2.0 was a strict increase in usability for every non-technical person I know. I have no idea precisely what you are calling "Web 2.0" because in my mind, the technology elements of Web 2.0 outlined on the wikipedia page definitely have absolutely nothing to do with "getting URLs wrong", "forgetting TLDs". Changes from the same time period (around 1999) that were not typically considered to be part of "Web 2.0" were also responsible for a dramatic increase in the prevalence of popup ads. I think you're talking about something entirely different.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  It's tricky because I don't know what Web 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 etc even mean since they're poorly defined. Generally I see the anti-Web2.0 digital vegan perspectives to be about opposing Javascript. I maintain that the Web after widespread Javascript was strictly more usable for non-technical people. I disagree that the pre-JS web was somehow incomplete or in a developer preview.

DrSiemer 5y ago

Of course we should not be complacent about it. We can try to come up with creative solutions, that limit the more negative side effects of this thing we have unleashed. But the one thing we cannot do is take it back. The general public needs their nuggets of endorfine. There is a lot of rosy retrospection when it comes to the old web, but really, most blogs were a pretty lonely place back then. It is hard to deny how modern solutions allow even someone with the most limited technical skillset to establish a meaningful online presence. Web 1.0 simply did not provide the same level of accessibility.

nonrandomstring 5y ago
> But the one thing we cannot do is take it back. True. We cannot take it back in it's entirety, nor would we want to. But for some people that quickly becomes the argument for a kind of technological irreversibility principle, that we cannot take back any mis-step or feature no matter how immediately awful and obvious its effects. Left unchallenged that entitlement becomes an argument for bullheaded intransigence and the labelling of whatever suits us as 'progress'. In reality many "genies" are strategically limited; poisons, invasive species, bio-agents, nuclear materials, knowledge hazards, weapons, bad poetry... Sure, I am really glad we won the crypto wars and that "code wants to be free" etcetera, but on the other hand that seems to have set off a kind of megalomania in tech, which legitimises turning the entire digital world into our own personal laboratory for experimenting on everyone, sans ethics oversight committee. > The general public needs their nuggets of endorfine. Here we go again "saying what people need" for them. I meet a lot of people desperate to get off the digital morphine drip. > There is a lot of rosy retrospection when it comes to the old web It seems like that. I've made a more elaborate argument in other threads. You're right that it's "rosy", like all nostalgia. Of course the past was crap in its own ways. But melancholia is a symptom of crisis, retro is a sign of interregnum and loss of common sense (literally our common sense of things). What does it mean? It means that our "progress" isn't serving us fully, and in some cases causing people to recoil from it. Not acknowledging that would be an error. > Web 1.0 simply did not provide the same level of accessibility. Of course not. But there are many qualities/metrics by which we might judge things if we are to avoid what I'd call the "democratic fallacy"; external cost, stability, longevity, coherence, security, safety, interoperability, accuracy and truth content, environmental cost.... Technology is multi-dimensional. Accessibility is all lovely and cool, but it should not be put ahead of more important human concerns. OTC opioids are more accessible than street drugs ever were, that doesn't make it an unqualified "good thing". So we can still enumerate the ways in which Web 2.0 is worse than Web 1.0 without invoking nostalgia for a "smaller cosy digital world".